Update (3-21): Mysteriously (but fortunately), this particular error has now been corrected.
Or: Why you can’t trust Google Maps.
Consider this. Looks great, doesn’t it? A reasonably-nice-sounding hotel with high-speed wireless internet, located a mere 0.1 miles from the University of Missouri mathematics department.
Um, no. Guess again.
The La Quinta Inn of Columbia, Missouri is indeed located at 901 Conley Road — that much is true. That, however, is not what the map shows. What the map shows is where the La Quinta Inn would be if it were located at 901 Conley Avenue.
Conley Avenue, it turns out, is a street on the university campus. Conley Road, by contrast, is 3.4 miles (and a $15 taxi ride) away from the campus.
This is exactly the kind of mistake that you would expect a human to make, but that a computer should definitely not make. After all, you can easily imagine a human rolling their eyes at such a “pedantic” distinction as that between “road” and “avenue”, or assuming that no town would give two different streets the “same” name. (At least, I can easily imagine this, having tried to explain to calculus students that the domain of the function
is not all of
despite the equation
.) A computer, however, is supposed to be ruthlessly precise — which is why you will (almost) never be given a break when typing web addresses, no matter how “close” you come to typing the correct character sequence.
So does this costly error indicate some sort of progress in the field of artificial intelligence, or should I just be ticked off that somebody at Google deliberately programmed the human “not-caring-about-the-distinction-between-’X road’-and- ‘X avenue’ ” bug into their software?
Oh, and the wireless internet at La Quinta is lousy.
Posted by James Cook 
